Shane Gu

I started PhD in Machine Learning under Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Fellowship in the fall 2014, where I am co-supervised by Richard E. Turner and Zoubin Ghahramani at University of Cambridge, and Bernhard Schölkopf at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. I also collaborate closely with Sergey Levine at UC Berkeley/Google Brain and Timothy Lillicrap at DeepMind. I completed my B.ASc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, where I did my thesis with Prof. Geoffrey Hinton in distributed training of neural networks using evolutionary algorithms. I also had a great fortune and fun time working with Prof. Steve Mann, developing real-time HDR capture for wearable cameras/displays. I previously interned at Google Brain hosted by Ilya Sutskever and Vincent Vanhoucke. My PhD is funded by NSERC and Google Focused Research Award on Reliable and Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning. I am a member of Jesus College, Cambridge. I am a Lab Scientist at Creative Destruction Lab, one of the leading tech-startup incubators in Canada.
I am looking into machine learning involving sequential processing, such as reinforcement learning and sequence prediction. I currently focus on learning-driven approaches for robotics, which have been covered by Google Research Blogpost and MIT Technology Review. I also work on deep learning, probabilistic models, and generative models.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems